Tag Archives: Vote

Polemics

Why did 77% of young unmarried women vote for Obama in 2008?

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Consider this analysis from a left-wing site of the 2008 election.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election.

[…]But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

In particular, note the chart that shows that younger unmarried women voted 77-22 for Obama. 77-22 for Obama. This is actually in keeping with my previous post on this topic, which documented how women have continuously voted for bigger and bigger government since they started voting. The problem with big government policies is that they drain money from the family which is then redistributed outside of the family.

To have a strong family, you need more than just money. You need independence so that you can keep your vision distinct and separate from the vision of the government. If a family depends on the government, then they are beholden to the government’s values. The government can even overrule conscience rights and religious liberty. Keeping the family strong and separate from government is especially important for Christian parents who have a specific goal of passing on their faith to their children.

Here are just a few of the things I thought of that help make a marriage strong: (there are many more)

  • low taxes so the household has more money to spend on the things we need for our plan
  • access to low cost energy provided by domestic energy production by private firms
  • access to low cost, high quality consumer goods through increased free trade
  • the ability to choose homeschooling or private schools (and the more school choice, the better)
  • the ability to fund a retirement plan that covers the family – not anyone else
  • the ability to purchase a health care plan that covers the family – not anyone else
  • the ability to own firearms for protection of the home and the family
  • the ability to pass Christian convictions on to children without interference from the state
  • the ability to speak and act as a Christian in public without reprisals from secular left special interest groups
  • low threat of being the victim of criminal activity
  • low threat of being bankrupted by the costs of divorce court
  • low threat of being arrested on a false domestic violence charge (e.g. – verbal abuse)
  • low threat of never seeing your children because of loss of custody after a divorce
  • low threat of being imprisoned due to failure to pay alimony and child support after a job loss

It seems to me that a vote for Obama is a vote against all of these things. So then why did unmarried women (especially Christian women) vote for him? It seems as thought they are less interested in marriage and family and more interested in having the government provide incentives for anti-child, anti-family behaviors like pre-marital sex, contraceptives, abortions, welfare for single mothers, divorce courts, government coercion of husbands, state-run day-care, government-run schools, in-vitro fertilization, etc. I don’t mind if people need these things, but they should pay for it themselves. but I don’t see why unmarried women should favor family money being spent on government programs that help other people to avoid the cost and consequences of their own decisions.

News

Canadian Evangelicals and Catholics more opposed to secularism and socialism

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The Hill Times reports. (H/T Joanne from Blue Like You)

Excerpt:

According to the recently-released EFC study, “Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996-2008,” which uses a series of electoral polls by Ipsos Reid and Angus Reid Strategies, in 1996 the Evangelical support for the Liberals was 35 per cent and it has been rapidly going down to 11 per cent in the last election, as the Conservative vote rose. The Conservatives’ support from evangelical Christians peaked in 2006, with 60 per cent of the Evangelical vote and then dropped to 48 per cent in 2008. The NDP vote in 2008 was at 16 per cent among evangelicals.

Evangelicals make up about 12 per cent of Canada’s population, or four million people distributed throughout Canada and to a lesser degree in Quebec.

[…]”There are two things that are fairly important for evangelicals, as they are important to Canadians who engage in the political system. The first thing is that there’s space created for engagement; so we have identified in the paper some of the incidents where it appeared that the Liberal Party was closing down the opportunity for evangelicals to engage on equal footing with non-evangelicals in the party and we’ve also identified where the Conservative Party had opened some place for evangelicals to engage on an equal footing,” said Don Hutchinson, EFC vice-president and co-author of the report.

[…]According to this research, Catholic support for the Liberal Party has dropped 24 points since 2000. In 2006 they were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal and by the 2008 election, they showed preference for the Conservative Party.

Joanne (who calls the Liberal leader “Iffy”) adds:

The question is less why it happened – because that is obvious, but rather why do the Liberals even bother?

Being religious usually involves having a moral compass and a set of strong values. It also means showing respect for other folks’ spiritual views.

Clearly Iffy is hardly the poster boy of unwavering commitment and sticking to principles and decisions. Furthermore, his strategists have have often shown contempt for people of faith and great delight in stirring up pseudo-scandals like Wafergate.

In other words, they are unable to walk the talk.

Michael Ignatieff appears to be an atheist. His Liberal party is anti-Christian, anti-marriage, anti-family, anti-liberty and anti-prosperity. I am surprised that anyone could vote for the Liberals, or worse, the New Democrats or the Bloc Quebecois. The left in Canada is hostile to publicly-expressed authentic Christianity across the board. The left is happy to violate the rights of authentic Christians in Canada.

Related posts

Commentary

One of the best things about being a Christian is other Christians

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I wanted to highlight some of the Christian blogs that I’ve discovered since I started blogging.

The top one in the list is definitely Neil Simpson’s blog. I was just reading over there today and he was really hard on poor Dawn Eden, whose book on chastity I have read. I recommend it, although she doesn’t go as far as I would. Anyway, she’s responded in the comments. She is currently taking classes in philosophy and theology, so it should be a good fight between her and Neil! Dawn’s blog is here.

I also noticed this post over on Laura’s blog, but it’s cross-posted on Hot Air. Laura writes about how the left implicitly doesn’t trust parents to make decisions about how they address the topic of sex when talking to their own children. She writes about the left’s view of parents:

Our teens are political pawns for the left.  They’re helpless victims of our prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes),  socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship,  mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer.   The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.

Over on Muddling Toward Maturity, he links to a Chuck Colson story on how the self-esteem movement in education and parenting has undermined civility in our children. Here is an excerpt from Chuck Colson:

Whether or not today’s kids are actually “ruder than ever,” the article and others like it reflect the sense that something has gone wrong in the way we raise our children. Specifically, it has to do with “popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem.”

These movements produce parents who “[respond] with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way.” By “getting in the child’s way,” they mean doing anything that might make the child feel less-than-wonderful about him or herself—in the classroom, among their peers, or on the playing field.

Denyse O’Leary takes on the theistic evolutionists here at Post-Darwinist. I love it when she gets mad at them! She gets right to the heart of the issue: is there objective evidence of intelligent agency active in nature? Intelligent design supporters say YES, atheists and theistic evolutionists (but I repeat myself) say NO.

A video of Denyse talking about her book “The Spiritual Brain” here: (H/T Mindful Hack)

She talks about whether faith is good for people, and how people invent genes to explain their bad behavior.

Kreitsauce writes about the importance of self-denial and self-sacrifice in the Christian worldview, which is neglected these days now that the church has bowed to the society at large and reduced Christianity to feelings of happiness.

Discipleship, in contrast to narcissism, brings true satisfaction with life, because life gains a whole new sense of meaning and purpose. We have real freedom to do what is right, to live a life of intimacy with God. This life of discipleship and self-denial does not mean living without desire or without anything that brings pleasure. God does not call us to the monastery but to live life in the world but not of the world.

Chad at Truthbomb Apologetics has a post up that I will be writing about shortly, because it’s that good. He links to an episode of Casey Luskin’s ID The Future podcast featuring a discussion between a Darwinist and Socrates. He has an excerpt from the dialog here on his blog. The entire dialog is in a PDF on his site.

Tough Questions answered has an analysis showing which “Christian” groups swung from Bush to Obama, as well as this post on post-Christian morality in secular-leftist European nations. TQA cites this article from First Things that argues what I have been arguing recently in my series on atheism and morality.

Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose (or would have chosen) to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands…

The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred will be definitively put to rest by 2040.

…In an interview for a British magazine during the summer of 2005, Singer said that if he faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save the animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child’s death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value.

Yes, there is consistent, authentic atheist morality: the happiness of the strong trumps the non-existent human rights of the weak.

My buddy Rich and I scrap over whether chastity is better than marriage over at the Pugnacious Irishman. (He’s getting married shortly, and my friend Robb is getting married tomorrow, so it’s a hot topic for me!)

Over on the Western Experience, Jason has a post up on how Dick Cheney is taking on Obama on his lousy policies. Here’s a clip:

Unqualified teleprompter-reader versus qualified statesman. Nice Deb has a complete round-up here, featuring Michelle Malkin and others. I have to tell you, I am really liking what Liz Cheney has to say these days, as well.

By the way, if you’re into Obama versus the evidence, check out this video on the real value of Obama’s health care reforms, which I found at the Christian blog Verum Serum.

If you have not bookmarked this blog, better do it. They are a new blog, but they are producing high-quality videos and getting linked by major blogs.